Too Many Bugs

[MattyT]

A quick scan of the Bugzilla product shows we have 868 open bug reports.

There's a chart here of our reports:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/reports.cgi?product=Bugzilla&datasets=NEW%3A&datasets=ASSIGNED%3A&datasets=REOPENED%3A&datasets=UNCONFIRMED%3A

This is RFEs too, but I'd expect them to only increase in proportion to
bugs slowly (it's a bit less than 50% RFEs ATM), so this chart assumedly
shows a dramatic increase in bugs.

While one would expect more bugs from more features, it is still way too
high.  And no, being able to track so many bugs does not make it a good
advertisement for us.

So anything you could do to help this situation would be good.  If one
day we could institute a no-known-bugs policy for releases because of
this, well that would be even better.

There are lots of options here to help the situation:

- fix bugs
- find bug reports that are really RFEs and change their severity
- find bugs that have been fixed in the mean time and mark them as such
(please, not as WORKSFORME if there's any evidence they were confirmed)
- find dupes and mark them as such
- find bugs that are still active and pester people that when you insert
a feature, bug fixing is a responsibility, not a optional extra

Any of the above would be mucho cool, and hopefully I'll be doing some
of this in the near future myself.

With any luck, the architectural work that has gone into 2.16 and 2.18
will stand us in good stead to reduce this more easily, rather than just
increasing it in the short term as new code is introduced.

Does anyone have any ideas about how we can arrest the upward trend and
hopefully reverse it?

It would be good if we can get a chart of bugs and no RFES, once bmo
upgrades to customised charting.

Another possibility is requiring every release to have 100 (or so) less
bugs than the one before and just before release leaving the tree closed
to features until it does.  I can predict the response to this, but
something needs to be done.

If you've got any better ideas, let's hear them.

-- 
         Matthew Tuck: Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy        
 My Short Autobiography: 1985 Grade Bin Monitor 1990 Class Clown Award
1992 Awarded Most Likely To Spontaneously Combust 1996 Crowned Galactic
         Emperor 1998 Released From Smith Psychiatric Hospital